During the boom Tom Hersey's Swanee Hotel—repaired, enlarged, repainted—had become Hotel Swanee. At the corner of the two streets on which it fronted he had added a square tower or "observatory." But neither guests nor "residenters" had made use of it as he had designed. Its low top was too high to be reached with that Southern ease which Northern sojourners like, and besides, you couldn't see more than half the earth anyhow when you got up there.

Early, therefore, it had been turned into an airy bed-chamber for Bulger. He, however was gone. He had left Suez for good and all on the same day on which John March arrived from abroad, being so advised to do by Captains Champion and Shotwell, who loved a good joke with a good fat coward to saddle it on, and who had got enough of Bulger on the day of the skirmish mentioned a page or two back. The tower room he left came to be looked upon as specially adapted for the sick, and here, some eleven or twelve months after the wreck of the Three Counties Land and Improvement Company, Limited, John March lay on his bed by night and sat on it by day, wasted, bright-eyed, and pale, with a corded frown forever between his brows save in the best moments of his unquiet sleep.

On the hither side of one of the two streets close under him, his office—the old, first one, reopened on his return—stood closed, the sign renovated and tacked up once more, and the early addendum, Gentleman, still asserting itself, firmly though modestly, beneath the new surface of repair. In and from that office he had, for these many months, waged a bloodless but aggressive and indomitable war on the men who, he felt, had robbed, not merely him, but his mother, and the grave of his father, under the forms and cover of commerce and law; yet from whom he had not been able to take their outermost intrenchment—the slothful connivance of a community which had let itself be made a passive sharer of their spoils. Now, in that office his desk was covered with ten days' dust. "If you don't shut this thing up straight off and go, say, to Chalybeate Springs," the doctor had one day exclaimed, "you'll not last half through the summer." March had answered with jesting obduracy, and two nights later had fainted on the stairs of Tom Hersey's hotel. For twenty-four hours afterward he had been "not expected to live." During which time Suez had entirely reconsidered him—conduct, character, capacity—and had given him, at the expense of his adversaries, a higher value and regard than ever, and a wholly new affection. It would have been worth all the apothecary's arsenic and iron for someone just to have told him so.

A Suez physician once said to me—I was struck with the originality of the remark—that one man's cure is another's poison. Not even to himself would March confess that this room, so specially adapted for the average sick man, was for him the worst that could have been picked out. It showed him constantly all Suez. Poor little sweating and fanning Suez, grown fat, and already getting lean again on the carcass of one man's unsalable estate!

"Come here," said Fannie Ravenel behind the blinds of her highest window, to one who loved her still, but rarely had time to visit her now, "look. That's John March's room. O sweet, how's he ever again to match himself to our littleness and sterility without shriveling down to it himself? And yet that, and not the catching of scamps or recovery of lands, is going to be his big task. For I don't think he'll ever go 'way from here; he's just the kind that'll always feel too many obligations to stay; and I think his sickness will be a blessing straight from God, to him and to all of us who love him, if it will only give him time to see what his true work is—God bless him!" The two stood in loose embrace looking opposite ways, until the speaker asked, "Don't you believe it?"

"I don't know," said the other, gently drawing her away from the window.

Fannie yielded a step or two and then as gently resisted. "Sweetheart," she cried, with a melting gaze, "you don't suppose—just because I choose to remember what he is and what he is suffering—you can't imagine—O if you mistake me I shall simply perish!"

"I know you too well, dear," caressingly murmured the guest, and they talked of other things—"gusset and band and seam"—for it was Saturday and there was to be a small occasion on the morrow. But that same night, long after the house's last light was out, the guest said her prayers at that window.

The windows of March's chamber, albeit his bed's head was against the one to the east, opened four ways. The one on the west looked down over the court-house square and up the verdant avenue which became the pike. Here on the right stood the Courier building! There was Captain Champion going by it; honest ex-treasurer of the defunct Land Company. His modest yet sturdy self-regard would not even yet let him see that he had been only a cover for the underground doublings of shrewder men. Yonder was the tree from which Enos had been shot by his own brother—who was dead himself now, killed, with many others, in that "skirmish" which John could never cease thinking that he, had he but been here, might have averted. Over there were the two churches, and one window of Ravenel's house. March had not been in that house a fourth as many times as he had been prettily upbraided for not coming.

"Fannie's grea-atly cha-anged!" Parson Tombs said, with solemn triumph.

John had dreamily assented. The change he had noticed most was that the old zest of living was gone from her still beautiful black eyes, and that her freckles had augmented. He had met her oftenest in church. She had the Suez Sunday-school's primary class, and more than filled the wide vacancy caused by Miss Mary Salter's marriage to the other pastor. These two wives had grown to be close friends. On the Sunday to which we have alluded they had their infants baptized together. Fannie's was a girl and did not cry. Johanna, in the gallery, did, when Father Tombs, with dripping hand, said,

"Rose, I baptize thee."

Tears had started also in the eyes of at least one other: Fannie's guest, as we say, whose presence was unusual and had not escaped remark. "The wonder is," Miss Martha had said, "that she has time, or any strength left, to ever come in to town-church at all, with that whole overgrown Rosemont on her hands the way it is! If I had a sister no older than she is—with that look on her face every time she falls into a study"—she stopped; then sharply—"I tell you, that man Garnet"—and stopped again.

From the tower's south window there was a wide view up and down the Swanee and across the bridge, into Blackland. March never looked that way but he found himself staring at those unfinished smelting works. Smart saplings were growing inside the roofless walls, and you could buy the whole plant for the cost of its brick and stone.

The north window view hurt still worse. The middle distance was dotted with half a dozen "follies" "for sale," each with its small bunch of workmen's cottages, some empty, some full, alas! and all treeless and grassless under the blazing sun. Far beyond to the right, shading away from green to blue, rose the hills of Widewood—lost Widewood!—hiding other "tied-up capital" and more stranded labor. For scattered through those lovely forests were scores, hundreds, of peasants from across seas, to every separate one of whom the scowling patient in this room, with fierce tears perpetually in his throat, believed he owed explanation and restitution.

Garnet!—owned half of Widewood! March's confinement here dated from the night when he had at length unearthed the well-hid truth of how the stately Major had acquired it. No sooner had Ravenel and Garnet got the Land Company into its living grave, than Gamble and Bulger, with Leggett looming mysteriously in their large shadows, forced the Construction Company into liquidation by a kind demand upon Mattox, Crickwater, and Pettigrew for certain call loans of two years' standing, accepted in settlement their shares of the Widewood lands wrested from the Land Company, and then somehow privately induced Garnet to take those cumbersome assets off their hands at a round cash price. That was the day before March had got home and Bulger had cleared out. Gamble had departed much more leisurely. Whenever money was at stake Gamble had the courage of a bear with whelps. Whenever he said, "I can't afford to stay here," it meant that his milk-pail was full and the cow empty. This time it meant he had, as Shotwell put it, "broken the record of the three counties—pulled the wool over Jeff-Jack's eyes;" for he had sold his railroad to a system hostile to the fortunes of Suez.

The other half of Widewood was public domain.

"Thank Heaven for that!" said March, lying dressed on his bed.

"Suez thanks Mr. Ravenel," melodiously responded his mother. Parson Tombs had brought her up here and slipped out again on creaking tiptoe.

"Why, mother, it was I made it so in my original plan!"

"O my beloved boy, it was in Mr. Ravenel's original plan when he lent your poor father the money to send you to school. I have it on good authority."

The son gave a vexed laugh. "O, as to that, why Cornelius Leggett suggested it when——"

"John! forbear!" Mrs. March was not prejudiced. She could admit the name of a colored person in a discussion; but that miscreant had lured her trusted Jane to the altar and written back that she was one of the best wives he had had for years.

John forbore. He was profoundly distressed, but tried to speak more lightly. "Law! mother, one reason urged by Major Garnet for our privately reserving that trifling scrap of sixty acres on the west side of the creek was so's to make each half of the company's tract an even fifty thousand acres, one for the three counties and the other—O! there's another thing. I never thought to tell you because it was hardly worth remembering. On Major Garnet's suggestion, and so's to never get it mixed up with the Company's lands—you know how carelessly our county records are kept—I made a relinquishment to you of my half of your and my joint interest in those sixty acres. I never supposed I was going to make it one day the only piece of Widewood left you."

"Ah!" sighed the hearer, "half as many dollars would be far better for a helpless widow."

John was scowling in another direction and did not see her pretty blush. His voice deepened with indignation. "I'll give you double—right here—now—cash!"

"Will you write the receipt for me to sign?" she sweetly asked.

He started up, wrote, paid, and smiled as he shut his empty purse. His mother sighed in amiable pensiveness, saying, "This is a mystery to me, my son."

"No more than it is to me," dryly responded John, angered by this new sting from his old knowledge of her ways. It was her policy always to mystify those who had the best right to understand her. "I shall try to solve it," he added.

"I should rather not have you speak of it at once," she replied, almost hurriedly. "You'll know why in a few days." Her blush came again. This time John saw it and marvelled anew. He tossed himself back on his bed, fevered with irritation.

"Mother"—he fiercely shifted his pillows and looked at the ceiling—"the chief mystery to me is that you seem to care so little for the loss of our lands!"

"I thought you told me that Major Garnet considered those sixty acres as almost worthless."

"I believe he does."

Her voice became faint. "I would gladly explain, son, if you were only well enough to hear me—patiently."

He lay rigidly still, with every nerve aching. His hands, locked under his head, grew tight as he heard her rise and draw near. He shut his eyes hard as she laid on his wrinkling forehead a cold kiss moistened with a tear, and melted from the room.

"Mother!" he called, appeasingly, as the door was closing; but it clicked to; she floated down the stairs. He turned his face into the pillow and clenched his hands. By and by he turned again and exclaimed, as from some long train of thought, "'Better off without Widewood than with it,' am I? On my soul! I begin to believe it. But if you can see that so clearly, O! my poor little unsuspicious mother, why can't you even now understand that they were thieves and robbed us? Who—who—what—can have so blinded you?"

He left the bed and moved to his most frequent seat, the north window. Thence, in the western half of the view, he could see the three counties' "mother of learning and useful arts," fair, large-grown Rosemont, glistening on her green hills in each day's setting sun, a lovely frontispiece to the ever-pleasant story of her master's redundant prosperity. Her June fledglings were but just gone and she was in the earliest days of her summer rest. "Enlarged and superbly equipped and embellished," the newspapers said of her in laudatory headlines, and it was true that "no expense had been spared." Not any other institution in Dixie spread such royal feasts of reason and information for her children, at lavish cost to herself, low price to them, and queenly remuneration to the numerous members of the State Legislature who came to discourse on Agriculture, Mining, Banking, Trade, Journalism, Jurisprudence, Taxation, and Government.

How envied was Garnet! Gamble and Bulger were thrifty and successful, but Gamble and Bulger had fled and envy follows not the fleeing. Halliday had attained his ambition; was in the United States Senate; but the boom had sent him there, "regardless of politics," to plead for a deeper channel in the Swanee, a move that was only part of one of Ravenel's amusing "deals," whereby he had procured at last the political extinction of Cornelius Leggett. Moreover, for all the old General's activities he had kept himself poor; almost as poor as he was incorruptible; who could envy him? And Ravenel; Ravenel was still the arbiter of political fortune, but it was part of his unostentatious wisdom never to let himself be envied. But Garnet, amid all this business depression upon which March looked down from his sick-room, wore envy on his broad breast like a decoration. There were spots of tarnish on his heavy gilding; not merely the elder Miss Kinsington, but Martha Salter as well, had refused to say good-by to Mademoiselle Eglantine on the eve of her final return to France; Fanny Ravenel had, with cutting playfulness, asked Mrs. Proudfit, as that sister was extolling the Major's vast public value, if she did not know perfectly well that Rosemont was a political "barrel." And yet it was Garnet who stood popularly as the incarnation of praiseworthy success.

John March, begrudged him none of his triumphs—at their price. Yet it was before this window-picture his heart sunk under the heaviest and cruelest of his exasperations. Other bafflements tormented him; here alone stood the visible, beautiful emblem of absolute discomfiture. For here was the silent, lifted hand which forbade him pursue his defrauders. Follow their man[oe]uvres as he might, always somewhere short of the end of their windings he found this man's fortune and reputation lying square across the way like a smooth, new fortification under a neutral flag. Seven times he had halted before them disarmed and dumb, and turned away with a chagrin that burnt his brain and gnawed his very bones.

There came a footstep, a rap at the door, and Parson Tombs entered, radiant with tidings. "John!" he began, but his countenance and voice fell to an anxious tenderness; "why, Brother March, I—I didn't suspicion you was this po'ly, seh. Why, John, you hadn't ought to try to sit up until yo' betteh!"

"It rests me to get out of bed a little while off and on. How are you, these days, sir? How's Mrs. Tombs?"

"Oh, we keep a-goin', thank the Lawd. Brother March, I've got pow'ful good news."

"Is it something about my mother? She was here about an hour ago."

"Yass, it is! The minute she got back to ow house—and O, John, it jest seems to me like her livin' with us ever since Widewood was divided up has been a plumb providence!—I says, s'I, 'Wha'd John say?' and when she said she hadn't so much as told you, 'cause you wa'n't well enough, we both of us, Mother Tombs and me, we says, s'I, 'Why, the sicker he is the mo' it'll help him! Besides, he's sho' to hear it; the ve'y wind'll carry it; which he oughtn't never to find it out in that hilta-skilta wa-ay! Sister March, s'I, 'let me go tell him!' And s'she, jestingly, 'Go—if you think it's safe.' So here I am!" The old man laughed timorously.

"Well?" John kept his hands in his lap, where each was trying to wrench the fingers off the other. "What is it?"

"Why, John, the Lawd has provided! For one thing and even that the smallest, Sister March's Widewood lands air as good as hers again!"

"What has happened?" cried the pale youth.

"O, John, the best that ever could! What Mother Tombs and I and the Sextons and the Coffins and the Graveses and sco'es o' lovin' friends and relations have been a hopin' faw all this year an' last! Sister March has engaged her hand to Brother Garnet!"

"I think I'll lie down," said John, beginning to rise. The frightened Parson clutched him awkwardly, he reeled a step or two, said, "Don't—trouble"—and fell across the bed with a slam that jarred the floor. The old man moaned a helpless compassion.

"It's nothing," said March, waving him back. "Only my foot slipped." He dragged himself to his pillow. "Good-by, sir. I prefer—good-by!" He waved his visitor to the door. As it closed one of his hands crept under the pillow. There it seemed to find and rest on some small thing, and then a single throe wrenched his frame as of an anguish beyond all tears.

At Rosemont, as night was falling, Doctor Coffin, March's physician, the same who had attended him in boyhood when he was shot, stood up before the new Rose of Rosemont, in the greatly changed reception-room where in former years Bonaparte had tried so persistently to cross the Alps. She had left the room and returned and was speaking of Johanna, as she said, "She'll go with you. Have your seat, Doctor; she's getting ready and will be here in a few minutes."

The Doctor made a glad gesture. "I know how hard it must be for you to do without her," he said, "but if you can get along somehow for three or four days, why—you know she's away yonder the best nurse in the three counties—it'll make a world of difference to my patient."

"I hope he'll like her ways," replied the young mistress. "There's so much in that."

"Don't fear!" laughed the Doctor. "He hasn't looked so pleased since he first took sick as he did when I told him I was going to fetch her. By the bye, how do you sleep since I changed yo' medicine this last time; no better? Ain't yo' appetite improved any? I still think the secret of all yo' trouble is malaria; I haven't a doubt you brought it with you from the North! I wish I could find as good an explanation of yo' father's condition.—I just declare it's an outrage on the rights of a plain old family chills-and-fever doctor, for a lot of you folks to be havin' these here sneakin' nerve and brain things that calomel an' quinine can't—O! here's Johanna."

On his way through town again, with the black maid beside him in his battered top buggy, he paused at the Tombses' gate, hailed by the fond old Parson. "You haven't got her? Why, so you have!—'Howdy, Johanna, you're a bless'n' here to-night,' as the hymn says. Doctor, I hope an' trust an' pray Sister Proudfit's attack won't turn out serious——?"

The Doctor was surprised. "I ain't been called to her; didn't know she was sick."

"Well, I say!" exclaimed the Parson. "Why, it's all over town that you wuz, and that you found her so prostrated with relaxation of the nerves that her husband couldn't hold her still! You've heard, of co'se, that he's got back at last? Isn't it pathetic? I've been talkin' about it to Brother Garnet—you passed him just now, didn't you?—and as he says, her husband goes off, a walkin' ruin, to be gone three months, stays twelve, and arrives back totally unexpected on this mawnin's six-o'clock train, a-callin' himself cu'ud! Brother Coffin, you don't believe that, do you? Why, as Brother Garnet says, the drinkin' habit is as much a moral as a physical sickness, and the man that can make common talk of it in his own case to ev'y Tom, Dick, and Harry, evm down to the niggehs, ain't so much as tetched the deepest root uv his trouble, much less cu'ud! Why, Doctor, Brother Garnet see him, himself!—a-tellin' that C'nelius Leggett!—and pulled him away! Po' Brother Garnet! Johanna, I wish, betwixt the Doctor an' you, you could make him look betteh. His load of usefulness is too great. I declare, Brother Coffin, he was that tiud this evenin' that evm here, where you'd expect him to seem fresh and happy in his new joy, he looked as if, if it wa'n't faw the wrong of the thing, he'd almost be willin' to call upon the rocks and the mountains to fall on him and hide him.—But I mustn't detain you!"

The physician drove on, and by and by was leaving directions with Johanna and her protectors, Tom Hersey and his wife. "And, Tom, mind you, no visitors. It's his own wish. Good-night.—O!—that young Mr. Fair. March tells me he's expecting him any time within the next few days, to help lay the corner-stone of this new building up at the colored college; Fair Hall, yes. Whenever he comes take him right up to see March. I promised John you would!"